


The Pieces Of Their Shattered Hearts

by Avourellion



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F, F/M, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-06
Updated: 2020-11-06
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:35:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27342856
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Avourellion/pseuds/Avourellion
Summary: Five cities surround a vast inland lake. In the middle of the water, an island of soaring glass and crystal towers and buildings form the city and castle of Navarrë. The thing looks as though it were a cluster of gems that burst from the earth, carved down into shape. It is a city that has been grown, not built, but it sits eerily abandoned, everything still set out as though its people had simply vanished.Once a year for a week, the lake drains without explanation, and the sixteen-year-olds are sent down in as a rite of passage for a chosen few. Their goal? Learn as much about the crater's mysterious secrets as possible. Their ultimate goal: figure out what exactly happened to Navarrë.This year something is different. The lake drains a month early. Freak storms gather. The mountains dry and the lowlands freeze. People are going missing without a trace, to show up brutally killed days later or not at all. The people of the Cities have dealt with hardship before, and though this is unlike anything they've seen before, they're determined to endure. Certain that the secret to the freak occurrences are related to the secrets of Navarrë, the youths are sent down as always, but their quest is more dire than ever.
Relationships: Brendan Raumolírë/Auream Ravecerin, Raistyn Shiv & Sakrah
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	The Pieces Of Their Shattered Hearts

**Author's Note:**

> I'll do art of all of the characters soon, I promise. Y'all are allowed to yell at me with each artless update. Just... don't consider it 'official' art or anything, I'm still working out designs for them all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> With special thanks to my beloved beta reader, Gabs. I know you'll argue with this, but when I say I couldn't have done this without you, I mean it.

Raistyn was falling. Her world was black and cold, and she couldn't see. The vastness of the void seemed to press in, suffocating her, but be terrifyingly empty at the same time. She twisted midair, trying to get her bearings, and then suddenly she burst down through a cloud she hadn't seen, and the void gave way to a star-flecked sky. The earth stretched out below, white and silver with snow and mountains.

It was oddly peaceful, here above the world, alone with the wind and the stars.

Her arms became wings, and her freefall was stopped, and she was gliding through the air. A single feather came loose. Then another, and another, until she was just a human again. The dark shapes of the lost feathers swirled around her, turning into birds, but none of them could help her fly.

Then the ground was right there, rushing up to meet her, and she slammed into it, her body exploding with pain-

* * *

Raistyn woke up screaming. _Another nightmare._ Gingerly, she touched the bandages around her left hand. Her fingers came away wet and sticky; she must've ripped the wounds open while she'd slept. She flicked the wick on the oil lamp up and her room flared with light. _Deep breaths. Breathe. You're in bed, you're safe._

That was part of the reason she'd moved down to this remote part of the city, the screaming. There were only a dozen of them living in this level, not the hundreds you'd find higher up, and with so many rooms separating them all, no one could hear her when she had the falling nightmares.

Another part of her head was still screaming, still terrified, and her stomach was twisted in knots. Sometimes she was able to recover from her falling nightmares, but tonight didn't seem to be one of those times.

The air was cool against her bare skin when she pushed her blankets off and crossed to a water basin. It was more of a natural pool set back into the stone wall, and the water was warm as ever, pumped from some underground source, heated in the depths of the earth. That was the one and only bonus to living in the caves carved beneath the roots of the mountains rather than up in the peaks like the rest of her people.

She soaked her entire wrapped hand in the water until the fabric strips began to float away on their own and she could see what damage she had done.

The last two fingers of her hand were gone, the smallest entirely, and the other at the first joint. The rest of her hand was scarred and bloodied. Her wounds were the only injury that hadn't healed after she'd fallen out of the sky a month before, probably because she'd managed to rip it open with every nightmare she had.

She made quick work of rebandaging the stumps of her fingers and dressed. The tight-fitting shirt and leggings were woven from the insulating fur of the giant mountain goats, then a hardened leather bodice, a second layer of fur-lined trousers, and a knee-length leather coat with a heavy fur hood and layers of scarves around her face. Raistyn was only able to put a glove on her right hand, so she tied the end of her coat sleeve off instead, covering her left. She was used to the mountain chill, but that didn't mean she had to let herself freeze.

For the first mile, she took one of the lifts. It was a small, enclosed box that was raised and lowered throughout the mountain and the countless tunnels beneath it. There were stairs of course, but they were simply intended for moving between the levels, not going from the bottom where she was living to the eyries at the peak.

The lift was powered by the magnetized rocks set into the sides of the shaft. There were opposing magnets in the side of the lift box, and somehow they worked together to pull the box up and down. The magical charge through the stone that kept such massive magnets working would be reversed to send the lift back down. She'd never bothered to learn the specifics of how the magnet system worked, only caring that it worked to help her get around. Something about the magnets made the ride terribly jerky, with a split second of freefall when one set released before it grabbed onto the one above.

The one Raistyn was in would carry her all the way to what roughly equaled the surface outside the mountain. From there she cut through the passages, which were much larger, though just as empty in this unholy hour of the morning, to a larger lift. It worked on the same magnetic principle, but it was much smoother. It stopped once to pick up someone else, and they rode the way in silence before getting off several layers above.

The peak of the mountain was made up of another system of caves, though these ones were entirely natural. There were thousands of chambers in the mountain, each serving as the home to one of the rukhs that lived here, but nearly half of them stood empty. The mountain could be home to well over five thousand people at any given time, if not six or seven. Right now it barely even held two thousand, and only a few hundred were bonded to rukhs. Raistyn was lucky enough to be one of them.

She traced the steps to Sakrah's cave from memory, following the same path she'd taken hundreds of times before. He was asleep when she came to his cave, and she didn't try to wake him.

He was, in her opinion, the most beautiful of all them all. He was smaller than most of the other rukhs, but that counted for little. His feathers were more shades of silver than she'd thought existed.

Unlike most other birds, rukhs like Sakrah slept lying down, their wings wrapped around themselves. His wing was larger and far longer than Raistyn herself, and she had to use both arms and a foot to lift it away from his body so she could slide in next to him and lower it back over herself. He didn't wake. This was far from the first time she'd come up to him in the middle of the night. Even though the incident had been her falling off of him, plummeting through the air to the unforgiving ground, she'd still always felt safer with him than she did without.

His wing was warmer than any of the blankets she had, and she unbuttoned her coat to spread it out beneath her, not needing its warmth when she was under the wing. Raistyn nestled herself into the thick, soft feathers underneath Sakrah's wing and was finally able to drift off to sleep, free from the falling nightmares.

* * *

Raistyn woke to the first rays of dawn trickling through the gaps in Sakrah's feathers. It was considerably easier to roll out from under his wing than it had been to get beneath it originally, and she retrieved her coat as she stood up.

Sakrah was already awake, watching her with yellow-gold eyes. She swung her coat over her shoulders like a cape, not bothering to put her arms in, and she buried her fingers in the feathers on his neck, scratching his sweet spots.

"Even the darkest night will end, Sak," she murmured. "The sun will rise."

He tilted his head and opened his beak slightly and let out a warbling cry, somehow managing to give it a questioning note. 

"More nightmares," Raistyn admitted. "Falling. The birds. There's nothing new with it."

Raistyn pressed her forehead to Sakrah's. "If only I could _remember,"_ she whispered. "I don't remember it, Sak. I remember flying, and then there's a flash of falling, and then I woke up here. Please, Sakrah. Just _let me remember."_

He clicked his beak and cooed gently. But of course, he didn't speak. He was the only one who'd been there when she fell, and he was the only one who could tell her what had happened. But he couldn't tell her, and she couldn't remember. Raistyn would just have to suffer the falling nightmares until finally, _maybe,_ her memories came back.

He rubbed the side of his head against her chest. It was as large as her torso, each eye just slightly smaller than her fist. 

"Do you ever get nightmares? Do you remember falling?" She gave him one last scratch before crossing to a piece of leather stretched taut against the wall. It covered the distance from her waist to the top of her head, and wide as her armspan. Raistyn pressed an indentation on the wall next to it and it sagged inward, letting her slide it out of the way like a curtain. It covered a deep alcove with all of her flying supplies. Inside, a device of straps and buckles hung from a series of wooden pegs. She draped it around her shoulders so they wouldn't tangle and carried them over to Sakrah.

Sakrah stood perfectly still as she looped the harness around him, buckling it around his chest and wings. Nothing went around his head. Unlike a horse that needed a bridle, she directed Sakrah entirely with her legs. Raistyn fumbled several of the knots with her newly missing fingers, and it took her much longer to do the straps than it had done her before her injury, but finally, she managed. Sakrah lowered his wing so that she could push off the arm, vaulting onto his back.

A series of straps went around her legs and her waist, all designed to hold her onto the rukh's back without effort on her part, so her arms were free. Her feet slid into loops that would catch on hooks underneath her boots, allowing her to steer with them. Squeezing with different parts of her legs, or shifting her weight a certain way, all sent signals to Sakrah.

He stood perfectly still as she strapped herself into the harness and buckled up her coat. There was no saddle; she sat directly on Sakrah's back. There were other types of harnesses that _did_ have saddles with backs for traveling long distances, or heavier, tougher saddles for when the rukh riders flew to war, though Raistyn had never used either of them herself. She'd never had a need to.

When she was done, she dipped both of her feet down, angling her toes at the floor. Sakrah rose up to his full height, carrying Raistyn so high she could have reached up and touched the ceiling. He moved down the length of the cave. The rukh caves here were all situated along the sides of a crevasse that sliced into the side of the mountain. It was perfectly situated so that the caves were never directly exposed to the elements, but the rukhs could still easily fly in and out.

Sakrah perched on the edge of the cave, leaning over the drop. Raistyn checked and double-checked all the straps around herself. She hated being so paranoid but after the fall and the nightmares, she couldn't be too sure that everything was secure.

Her rukh turned around to stare at her. His expression seemed to say _can we go now?_

Raistyn blinked her second eyelids closed. They were a biological feature unique to the people who lived in the mountains. The clear eyelids closed sideways rather than up and down, and protected her eyes against the wind and the dry, cold air, allowing her to keep them open without them watering and stinging while flying.

"Falkh, Sakrah." The verbal command for _fly._

Sakrah leaned forward more and more until he plunged over the edge, diving straight down the crevasse, wings tucked in close. Raistyn leaned forward, pressing herself flat against his back. Her stomach jumped, trying to adjust to the sudden motion.

A foot gesture from her and Sakrah flipped to the side, snapping his wings out. They kept falling for what felt like an eternity but was less than a second in reality, before Sakrah caught the updraft caused by wind forced through the crevasse. He soared upward on it, following the crevasse out of the mountain. The sky was a mottled ribbon of orange and purple and blue and the gold of dawn high above them, reflected on the clouds.

The crevasse narrowed and narrowed until there Sakrah's wingtips were only the length of Raistyn's body away from the stone walls. It was closing in around them, and then Sakrah burst through into the open air. He beat his wings twice to propel them up into the sky before allowing them to glide.

Raistyn released her grip on the loops of the harness and flung her arms out. Her hair was pulled into a tight braid along her scalp, and the long trailing end of it swung around behind her like a whip.

The day was drawing bright and cold. The horizon was clear, the sun still hanging just below the mountains in the distance, but the sky above them was heavily blanketed with white. Sakrah let out a piercing, shrieking call that echoed through the air. 

Raistyn moved her left foot out to the side and her right down. Sakrah tilted left, spinning through the air into a steep dive. Together, they looped around, spun and dove, and climbed. It was exhilarating and wonderful and she felt oh so _alive._

When her head was spinning and she was dizzy enough that she could barely tell which way was up, she signaled Sakrah to level out, letting them glide flat. They were miles away from their mountain by now, but she wasn't worried. She knew the terrain below her like the back of her hands (or at least her right hand. She'd have to see about the left), and Sakrah could cover the distance in a matter of minutes.

Another signal from her and Sakrah was rising. The clouds seemed to come down to meet them. When they entered the clouds, the cold mist stung the exposed flesh on her face, Condensing moisture collected on her skin like tears before the wind wiped them away.

When they burst through, a puff of cloud followed them like smoke, rising up and settling back down. Sakrah dipped back down, skimming the clouds. They left a wake of disturbed cloud behind them as they flew into the sun.

It was dim and grey above the clouds one moment, and the next it exploded into glorious golden light, daggers of blazing sun piercing through the white mountains. In the space of a heartbeat, the sea of clouds became an ocean of molten glass

It blinded Raistyn, and she had to pry her stiff fingers off of the harness loops so she could shield her eyes. The tops of the clouds were glowing with hundreds of shades of reds and golds and whites.

Magical. There was no other word for it.

Raistyn lost track of how long they flew, alone among the clouds. She couldn't block the memories of her nightmares, but she could keep them confined to the corners of her mind. It was light here. She had Sakrah. She was flying, not falling.

When all traces of dim blue and purple had faded from the sky, Sakrah plunged back down through the clouds. She quickly lined their surroundings up with her mental map. They'd ended up almost above the Eversnow - the giant plateau in the north that pierced up into the sky, it's top even higher than the mountains leading up to it. Raistyn had been told over and over again never to fly above it, though never a reason. It was simply something one didn't do. She had no clue why - it was simply a frozen, barren wasteland. She had questioned the rule many times, and whenever she did, the people she asked would... discourage her from asking again.

Raistyn put the thoughts of the Eversnow out of her mind and angled Sakrah to the south, into the rising sun, back toward their mountain home.

Something felt off, _wrong,_ to her, but she couldn't put her finger on what. It wasn't until they were beginning their descent back down toward the crevasse that she finally realized what it was.

They'd been flying into the rising sun. They'd been flying south. Raistyn hadn't realized it while she'd been above the clouds, but it was terrifyingly obvious now.

The sun didn't rise in the south.

But it had.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Even the darkest night will end/and the sun will rise." -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYb9sRLUDyM


End file.
